The next morning didn't come with any windfall or revelation—no sudden knock at the door offering him money, nor beams of divine sunshine cradling his face. It came with another cough from the next room, as dry and brittle as the city's sympathy, and the early morning buzz of autorickshaws struggling through half-flooded streets.
*Mumbai rolls on,* Aryan thought.
As he stirred a packet of cereal with water—milk long gone—he could still feel the afterburn of the Perception Module humming in the curve of his spine. It was like his veins remembered something his skin had forgotten. He was back to baseline… but the baseline had shifted.
He wasn't who he'd been two nights ago. Or last week. Or maybe ever.
After gulping down a breakfast even his stomach seemed to insult, Aryan shut his laptop gently, slung a frayed backpack over one shoulder, and left the flat in silence.
He had a destination today. He had an idea.
*
The local cyber café was tucked inside a derelict arcade, entombed between a tailor shop and two bike garages run by guys who only spoke in curses and grunts. Shakti Internet Café had once been a popular LAN hangout for high schoolers and college dreamers. Now it was half-abandoned, smelling faintly of biryani, engine oil, and dial-up nostalgia.
Aryan paid ₹20 for thirty minutes and took the seat near the back. He didn't need the net speed—he needed the isolation.
The terminal flickered on.
No RealmKey. No A.I.D.A. He hadn't expected it. This wasn't his machine. He was fenced off from the Root Code here. But that was fine. Today, he didn't want to access it. He wanted to test it — from the outside.
He began a simple experiment.
A search query.
First, on normal Chrome:
"Highlight anomalies in keyword pattern deviation: Mumbai news, last 30 days."
No useful result. Just fluff, crime updates, politics.
Then he leaned back and did… nothing. Externally, at least.
In his mind, he summoned the pulse. It didn't come as light. Not sound. It was... choice. The taste of a forgotten option suddenly returned. A thread flicked into view—not visible, but tangible on some etheric plane just under his fingernails.
He brushed it. Focused.
The screen blinked once.
And just like that... a result loaded, unprompted:
"UNCLASSIFIED STATIC SHAKE + EMP Surge — Dadar West, July 27th, 3:42 AM.
Police report filed: Discarded. No follow-up."
EMP surge?
Aryan narrowed his eyes. That night — *that* night — was exactly when he opened the RealmKey for the first time.
His hand trembled slightly. It wasn't adrenaline. It was recognition. Validation.
Somehow, his access glitch had left an electromagnetic scar on the environment. Tiny, yes. Undocumented, almost. But real.
For the world, it was noise.
But Aryan could now *see signal.*
*
Outside the café, afternoon had shifted to monsoon-gray.
He didn't go home. Instead, he walked. No destination—just streets his legs chose while his eyes tried something else.
It took nearly twenty minutes for the sensation to return — a micro-trigger under his jaw. A tiny electric itch in his molars. The same subtle whisper A.I.D.A. had initiated during Perception Mode.
He looked around the street.
Vendors. Clothesline wires. Motorcycles.
And then he saw it.
Thin, vibrating lines — almost invisible — stretched across the air like laser tracers. Three connected an old streetlight to a nearby electric pole. Eight wrapped loosely around a half-broken payphone. They weren't real wires. Not physically. They were logic-threads. *Functional pathways in the reality layer.*
Every object had a logic.
Some pulses moved clockwise. Some jittered, fragmenting. Some were dying — fraying — rotting at the edge of their script.
And one... pulsed wrong.
A lamp post at the corner only blinked yellow to vehicles going south—not north. Its behavior field was broken, decaying. It skipped cycles.
Aryan reached out with his mind — carefully, the way a hacker approaches an unknown terminal.
"Thread Redirect," he whispered, instinct guiding the words.
The thread obeyed.
The lamp light changed.
Southbound traffic slowed. Northbound bikers now got the blinking caution rhythm.
Aryan let the thread go.
Nobody noticed.
But a single scooterist—phone in hand, texting—looked up in surprise just in time to dodge a pothole that would've sent him flying.
Saved. Minutely.
Reality hadn't snapped.
It had rewritten.
No big cost.
No noise.
Exactly how Aryan liked it.
*
That evening, back at home, Aryan checked in on his mother—pills arranged, food served.
She smiled at him gently and said, "You look different today. Less tired, maybe."
He didn't answer. Just smiled and nodded.
But inside, something stirred. Knowledge intact.
He hadn't just changed a light pattern today — he'd altered probability.
Redirected causality thread energy. Nudged fate.
He didn't know how much power he had.
But it was growing.
"You are near Protocol 02," came the voice from his laptop afterward. AIDAs tone was calm.
"Entities within scan range have detected ripple deviation."
"Entities?" Aryan asked aloud.
"Others who see. Who listen. Who devour code that doesn't belong."
A pause. A line flickered:
"They've noticed *you.*"
Outside the window, the rain began falling upward.